Removing Armor Upgrade

[DireklianCliff]

Can someone help me? I'm trying to remove the gothic plate armor from the Polish Guards.

Thanks!

[Caesar Clivus]

Open the SS\data\export_descr_unit.txt file. Do a search for "Polish Guard".

Change:

armour_ug_models Polish_Guard, Gothic_Knights

to:

armour_ug_models Polish_Guard, Polish_Guard_ug1

[DireklianCliff]

Thank you, my good sir. That feels damn good.

[Ostrogski]

May I ask why do You want to remove the gothic plate armor from the Polish Guards?

[Ftmch]

Maybe he thinks it doesn't look good? ^^

I removed the armor upgrade for most of the templars, just because I don't like templars in heavy armour. (The visual part that is, they still get the stats).

[DireklianCliff]

On the contrary, I love the way the gothic knights look. They're one of the main reasons I play the HRE. But I truly feel that the HRE should be the only faction that has gothic armor and sallets outside of the general's bodyguard.

[Lord_Calidor]

Why you think so? Gothic style armour was widely used, and sallets even more so...

[DireklianCliff]

Well first of all, the Gothic Knights was the pride and joy of the HRE. That was the unique unit to them, even moreso than Zweihanders and/or Dismounted Gothic Knights. So, to me, it bothered me that others would take the image. I don't have a problem with other factions having full plate like Venice's Men-At-Arms or France/Spain/etc's Gendarmes, but the Gothic Knights are the Gothic Knights. That'd be like taking France's Lancers completely. Poland had the Hussars as their "unique" unit and I was mildly miffed when I saw that Hungary had them too.

Historically, in most of the rest of Europe, Italian plate was actually more popular. The southern German and Austrian smithing centers were the only things to rival it (these are the smiths that made gothic plate), but even then, Gothic armor was not seen as frequently as Italian plate. Gothic plate became so popular later on in manuscripts and so on due to its easily distinguished look. That's not to say that Gothic plate wasn't popular, because it was. However, it enjoyed vast popularity in a much more specific region, and that region (to my knowledge) was the HRE.

Nonetheless, the Gothic Knights are the unit that makes it stand apart from other factions, and therefore I like it to stay that way.

[Lord_Calidor]

Gothic Knights as a historical unit per se, didn't exist, as smithies sold armour to any bidder wealthy enough, be it a knight or commoner, archer or swordsman. From illuminated manuscripts, books & stone effigies, it is evident that gothic style armour parts as well as full harnesses were used from early-15th century also in Hungary, Croatia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland cantons and also in Italy, concurently with milanese style armours.

[Inhuman One]

I digged up this thread since I got a question.

There are quite a few upgrades around that I am not happy with, if a unit has one upgrade and thus two different appearances, will it keep the first appearance if I simply type down the reference of the first after the , mark?

For example, if the line says:

armour_ug_models Mailed_Knights, Mailed_Knights_ug1

and I change it to

armour_ug_models Mailed_Knights, Mailed_Knights

Would that keep them at the first appearance when upgraded while keeping the benefits of an upgrade?

And to ask a question after that, could I also assign another model to the upgrade if all factions that can train the specific unit have the skin for it?

[Inhuman One]

I couldnt wait anymore so I made a back up, tested the very thing I mentioned above with feudal knights and it worked!

And now I am just exited about setting a small step into modding, and want to take further steps later on.

I see mounts being mentioned here as well, if I refer to another mount thats available to that faction, will it work? and shields? how can I change the shield type thats worn? I dont mind about status, I just want to improve some appearances.

Might be a new tv program, Pimp my knight.

[Inhuman One]

hm, after some more changes and testing I see that I can keep upgrades from showing, but I havent been able to assign different models yet.

How can that be done? I would very much like to put in a visual difference between arquebusiers and Musketeers.

On a related note, Sicily used to have light swordsmen and I put their faction name amongst the others that get that unit, and it worked just fine, Sicily has light swordsmen in my game now, at least in custom battles.

So far my plans considering upgrade changes are the following:

Border horses are unique to the scots, I plan to put highlanders on top of them to allow a complete highlander army to be trained.

I removed all full plate appearances from the game where it was the final upgrade. But now all polish, chivalric, noble, imperial knights all stay dressed in partial plate. I intend to alter this here and there to use the models of lancers or gothic knights.

I am also going to try and make the byzantine army more diverse once all units are upgraded.

[Lord_Calidor]

For those changes you described, I'm afraid you gonna get down & dirty with mesh editor, like Milkshape 3D, and change the weapon, shield types etc.
If u only like to shuffle already existing models, you can edit only the modeldb file.
Here are some good tutorials for this:
http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=75706
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=74945

Also, do a search on Alletun's Tome of Knowledge, should be somewhere in mod tutorial section.

[Inhuman One]

hm well I dont want to create new units.

So far I only encountered the problem that units have the wrong weapons when I assign a different model for them.

Some things work, I think that foot archer models could be used on horse archers and backwards too but I also tried to make dismounted imperial knights look like gothic knights and they suddenly had a two handed sword instead of a mace and shield. As a result they wielded it like a one handed sword.

Still I think I can mess around a bit. Changing horses did work, now knights of Antioch wont have tripoli horses anymore.

[Caesar Clivus]

Unit models come complete with weapons. If you change the model, you get the weapon it comes with. That's why your new imperial knights had the gothic knight's sword. If you want to change weapons you have to edit the models themselves.

[Inhuman One]

That would get too advanced for me.

[Lord_Calidor]

Thats not so complicated. It can simply be achieved by using MS3D to cut out the weapons from existing models (you dont need to work on models, only delete the certain model parts from the list, like you delete a file in Windows Explorer), and then using GOM's converter to merge parts of model.

Have a look in those tutorials I posted earlier.

[Caesar Clivus]

Yeah like Lord Calidor said, its not as complicated as it sounds. You dont actually have to do any modelling or skinning to do this. And besides, its a good learning experience

[Inhuman One]

It sounds very complicated, what are all the things I could do with just this file though?

I dont want to do anything that could crash the game, anything I do wrong at the moment just causes units to be invisible or with weapons not appearing right.

[Caesar Clivus]

I dont want to do anything that could crash the game, anything I do wrong at the moment just causes units to be invisible or with weapons not appearing right.

Well that is why you always, always follow the first law of modding: ALWAYS BACK IT UP BEFORE YOU CHANGE IT

It just takes practice mate. When I first starting playing around with models and textures, I ended up with all sorts of whacky crashes and errors. But that is the best way to learn modding: trial and error.